Keywords
Distress
Informal Construction Workers
Scale
How to Cite
Abstract
Informal construction labourers in India significantly contribute to the industry’s Gross Value Addition (GVA). For instance, in India the unorganized segment was 75.9 per cent of the industry’s total GVA in 2020-21(NSO report). Despite this fact, informal construction labourers suffer from a high degree of economic distress amid rising inflation and uncertainty in income. This has intensified hardships as well as created immense financial distress among such labourers. For measuring their financial well-being/distress, Prawitz et al. (2006) developed In-Charge Financial Distress/Financial Well-Being (IFDFW) scale consisting of eight self-reported items, each of which assigns scores ranging from 0 (overwhelming stress) to 10 (low stress). Using this IFDFW scale the paper evaluates financial distress among different groups of construction workers in the few selected blocks in North and South Bengal. The overall average score of informal construction labourers is found to be 2.06 signifying a very high level of distress among them. This degree of distress is found to be different for different groups of informal labourers in the industry, i.e., self-employed labourers (highest in the class with a mean value of 1.89), from wage employed category, non-migrants and migrants, having the mean value of 2.09 and 2.22 respectively. Moreover, the scale demonstrated strong validity and reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha at 0.811, and, thus, the overall result concerning distress position of labourers could guide policy initiatives to support and uplift such workers.
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